Marcia O’Malley, the Thomas Michael Panos Family Professor in Mechanical Engineering (MECH), associate dean of engineering for research and innovation at Rice, and a pioneer in rehabilitation robotics, has been elected a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
O’Malley was recognized for her “outstanding contributions to rehabilitation robotics, haptics and robotic surgery.” She will be formally inducted as an AIMBE fellow in a virtual ceremony on March 25.
O’Malley is director of the Mechatronics and Haptic Interfaces (MAHI) Lab at Rice. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in MECH from Vanderbilt University in 1999 and 2001, respectively, and joined the Rice faculty in 2001. She holds complementary appointments in electrical and computer engineering, and computer science.
Her MAHI Lab includes more than a dozen graduate students, and she collaborates broadly with faculty across Rice, the Texas Medical Center (TMC) and other institutions. Her research funding has exceeded $7 million, with awards from NSF, NIH, ONR, NASA, industry and foundations.
AIMBE fellows are recognized for influential contributions to medical and biological engineering research, pedagogy, and/or practice, and for their ability to serve as an asset to the institute or as an advocate for the field and its diversity.
O’Malley’s work focuses on physical human-robot interaction for applications in rehabilitation, training and virtual reality. Her lab has developed robotic systems (hardware and control algorithms) for upper extremity rehabilitation after stroke and spinal cord injury, and devices for wearable haptic feedback, with applications in virtual reality, training and prosthetics.
In 2020, O’Malley was named a Fellow of the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). She is also a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and in 2020 was named its Dynamic Systems and Controls Division Nyquist Lecturer.
She has served on the editorial boards of the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics, the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, the Associations for Computing Machinery’s Transactions on Human Robot Interaction, and the ASME/IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics, and now serves as associate editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics. In 2021 she started a three-year term as editor-in-chief of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation Conference Editorial Board.
From 2017 to 2021, O’Malley served as special adviser to the provost on Educational and Research Initiatives for Collaborative Health (ENRICH). In that role, she was responsible for building educational and research collaborations between Rice faculty and researchers within TMC and greater Houston.
O’Malley received the Presidential Mentoring Award from Rice, and from 2016 to 2020 served as director of graduate studies in MECH, where she worked to increase diverse representation in the department’s doctoral program. By the end of her term, MECH had the most underrepresented minority doctoral students (eight out of 43) among Rice engineering departments – 43 percent of MECH’s domestic Ph.D. students and 19 percent of the total Ph.D. population.
MECH also had the highest number of black students (seven) of any department on campus, representing 33 percent of the department’s domestic Ph.D. students and 16 percent of their total Ph.D. population.
She has also engaged in public policy and advocacy efforts. In 2016, she was selected to meet with U.S. Congress members as part of the Robotics Caucus demonstration of robotics technology, where she demonstrated her exoskeleton designed for upper limb rehabilitation, work funded by NSF and NIH. She has served as co-chair of the ASME Robotics Public Policy Task Force since 2017, and became chair in 2021.
That same year she joined the ASME Committee on Government Relations as a member-at-large. She was invited to contribute to aspects of control for human-machine interaction in the planned “Control for Societal-Scale Challenges: Roadmap 2030,” organized by the IEEE Control Systems Society, which should be completed later this year.